Family Force 5 guitarist Solomon Olds recently granted an interview with Alternative Press about his favorite guitar — his 1984 Gibson Explorer, whose fretboard he is pictured licking.
What he said: “It’s the first guitar you hear in ‘Cadillac Phunque,’ the first song on our first album, Business Up Front/Party In The Back.
How he got the guitar: “I was looking for a Gibson Explorer because I was a big fan of Metallica and I saw them playing ESPs and Gibson Explorers. I bid on one guitar on eBay, but I lost, so I searched around and found this guitar on some Web site for a shop in Indianapolis. I live in Atlanta, so I called the guy and was like, ‘Hey, do you guys have that really ugly 1984 Gibson Explorer? It’s got the gold hardware and the weird custom paint job.’ The guy was like, ‘Yeah, it’s sitting right here on consignment.’ It was $1,800 at the time and I was like, ‘Man, I can’t afford that.’ So I let it go and thought, ‘I’m never gonna get this guitar.’ A year-and-a-half later, I called the same shop and was like, ‘I’m really looking for this Gibson Explorer. I called you about it, like, a year-and-a-half ago, and I’m wondering if it’s still hanging there.’ He said, ‘Yep, it’s still here.’ So I offered him $700 and he mailed it.”
Love is blind: “It’s maybe one of the ugliest guitars in the world, but it’s so beautiful to me. It has a really weird paint job and people always ask if it’s custom. It’s kind of off-white, kind of yellow and it’s got these gold and copper stripes all over it. It’s incredibly ’80s. Also, I’m a very tiny dude and it’s a very giant guitar.”
Oopsie: “There’s a part in our show where I always toss my guitar over to our tech, Xanadu. I saw Prince in 1999 and he tossed his guitar to a tech, like, 10 feet in the air. It was so dope, I wanted to do that. Well, the guy who rolls with me is not the same tech that Prince has, so he drops my guitar every once in awhile. Most of the time he does catch it but there have been two or three times that he didn’t catch it, so there’s a giant gash in the back of it. For some reason, Xanadu likes to dance with it after he catches it, so sometimes he drops it even after he safely caught it. I should have fired him years ago …”
